Despites its origins as a magazine serial, Tokyo Express’s an enviably taut, mystery novel by prolific, award-winning au…Despites its origins as a magazine serial, Tokyo Express’s an enviably taut, mystery novel by prolific, award-winning author Seichō Matsumoto. A bestseller since its first appearance in Japan in 1958, it’s since been adapted for both film and television. It’s now considered a classic of the flowering of Japanese crime fiction post-WW2 – the genre was banned during the war because it was considered a source of potentially decadent, unpatriotic ideas. At first the crime at the book’s centre seems relatively straightforward: a man and a woman are found dead on a desolate beach in wintry Kashii, next to them an empty bottle laced with cyanide, just another tragic, but predictable, example of double-suicide (Shinjū), a ritual that had become almost commonplace in the period after WW2. But one of the team assigned to the case, Inspector Torigai, isn’t satisfied with that explanation, he shares his suspicions with the equally-dogged, Inspector Mihara, sent from Tokyo to follow up on events. Torigai's, and then Mihara’s investigations, form the bulk of the story, in many ways they’re thinly-sketched figures yet somehow, they’re quite compelling. Shabby, world-weary, provincial Inspector Torigai’s a particularly sympathetic character, and his bond with the younger, overworked Inspector Mihara’s very effective. Their investigation, with its links to government corruption and bribery, provides a striking glimpse of the machinery of everyday life in post-war Japan, along with its many contradictions: an era of massive reconstruction resulting in a society caught between tradition and rapid change; a place weighed down by complex and damaging social and professional hierarchies, where industrialists thrive but the police are understaffed and poorly-paid. …